Emotional Capital and Older Workers Learning and Transfer of Knowledge Management: “Toward a Better Ageing, Working and Learning Together”

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Transfer of Knowledge Management: “Toward a Better

Ageing, Working and Learning Together”

Bénédicte Gendron

To cite this version:

Bénédicte Gendron. Emotional Capital and Older Workers Learning and Transfer of Knowledge Management: “Toward a Better Ageing, Working and Learning Together”: Case-study of a local response to global concerns. GLOBALISATION versus GLOCALISATION: Implications for HRD?, 8th International Conference in Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford University, July 2007, UK., Jun 2007, OXFORD, United Kingdom. �halshs-00264808�

GLOBALISATION versus GLOCALISATION: Implications for HRD?, 8th International Conference in Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford University, July 2007, UK.

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Learning and

Transfer of Knowledge Management: “Toward a Better

Ageing, Working and Learning Together”

Case-study of a local response to global concerns

Pr. Bénédicte Gendron*

* University of Montpellier III benedicte.gendron@univ-montp3.fr

Key words: management, older workers, human resources, emotional capital, emotional competencies

“Small Is Beautiful”, Schumacher, E. F. (1973), Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered Harper & Row Publishers, New York.

Introduction

Europe is getting older – a simple observation with far-reaching implications. The challenges posed by an aging society are tremendous. As the baby boom generation grows older, it is doubtful that ever-longer retirement will continue to be beneficial and affordable for individuals or the nation. Strongly believes that additional years of work will be increasingly desirable for a growing number of older French people and for the society as anywhere else in the European Union (EU). Nevertheless, as today’s workers evaluate their own retirement security, and as policymakers and business leaders assess the viability of the nation’s aging related programs and policies, they must recognize the need for significant changes in attitudes and practices. Work will be central to this process of change. The development and enhancement of employment for older workers constitutes a crucial issue for the Member States of the EU and for France in particular where less than 37% of workers over 55 years old are working. If the concern is global, a one-size-fits-all approach to face those challenges is not appropriate nowadays. How to plan working life will be crucial for all EU societies for economic, social and psychological and health issues. Finding ways to retain older workers, offering

Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford, July 2007 2 re-training and re-deployment if necessary, would make much more sense. Also, a human Knowledge Management which deals with the transfer of competences from experienced OW to youngsters and a human. Workforce management promoting a mixed-age workforce will be crucial and essential. Thus, there is a clear demand for more sophisticated and sensitive and human management throughout people’s working lives, alongside ongoing investment and training.

With the shortage of younger workers within the next decades and the baby-boomers departure, organisations are faced with the problem of loss of knowledge, skills and personnel. Nevertheless, if this concern is global, the successful responses will have to be locally based. Managers face a dilemma. Managers will have to evolve to manage higher diversity of situations, especially when the main issue is at keeping the strategic and key competences in the company at all local levels. Thus, each company will have to explore ways of retaining knowledge and personnel with a range of ages, skills and experience in the work force according their needs. They will need to put in place processes and supporting systems and work atmosphere to manage the retention of knowledge in the organisation when experienced workers retire, thus enabling older workers to transfer their skills, knowledge and experience as a corporate asset. Thus, managing age relations in organisations require an understanding of the ways in which workers of different ages are perceived and how these associate with optimal deployment. It requires a strong local knowledge on the company functioning and on its workforce to manage changes successfully. Consequently, those global challenges (I) suppose to rethink the organisational management in a human way. Above all, it will suppose to promote (II) diversity and to revisit knowledge and human resource managements toward an ergonomic, more human and ethic ways to allow a quality of work life and a better aging, working, learning, and living together (Gendron, 2007 submitted).

1. 1. The economic and social imperatives and global challenges

1.1. Ageing challenge

The aging of the EU work force will have major effects on economies. This has a direct impact on the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services. Also, labour force growth will slow dramatically as the baby boom generation retires. Fewer workers relative to non-workers imply lower national saving and investment. As a result, the growth of productivity and the standard of living will suffer. The economic implications called the “gray dawn” argues that aging populations will become “the transcendent political and economic issue of this twenty-first century.”

Aging lies at the heart of two of the most difficult policy challenges that France face today: reforming social security and pension scheme. Reform debates already have been rancorous, pitting older and younger generations against one another. Social security, health care and pension scheme benefits for retirees, require tax

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Management 3 revenues from younger workers. With fewer workers relative to retirees, the burden placed on younger generations will grow. Extending work lives would help reduce this burden. However, the work “solution” must be kept in perspective. An aging France as an aging Europe will present considerable economic and social challenges. Longer work lives will not solve all of these problems. But already, an effective pro-work agenda for older workers has been seen as a win-win for all parties involved — older workers, businesses, and government. Market competition and those demographic changes in the labour force are tow to the forces challenging organizations to develop new human resource management models and already to change of attitudes toward certain categories of workers.

1.2. Knowledge economy

Moreover, the economy and business context change embodies a transition from the concept of information value chain to a knowledge value chain. In the information value chain, technological systems was a key components guiding the organization's business processes, while humans were treated as relatively passive processors that implement 'best practices' archived in information databases. In contrast, the knowledge value chain treats human systems (human experience and knowledge) as key components that engage in continuous assessment of information archived in the technological systems and transfer person-to-person. This “new generation” knowledge has emerged out of advanced technology developments and globalized managerial practices, which will be increasingly essential for individuals, organizations and communities to be able to enhance their productivity and to achieve global success. In this view, 'best practices' can not be implemented without active inquiry by the human actors. And to engage human actors in an active process of sense making to continuously assess the effectiveness of best practices requires managing the workforce in a new way: toward partners’ relationship where emotional competence will differentiates successful managers with leadership style (Gendron, 2004, 2006). This new knowledge management model requires a new mentality with a global perspective. One of these perspectives is committed to competency-based learning, teamwork and collaboration in networks. And another one is committed to personal continuous improvement through lifelong learning, and towards changing traditional models of organizing. Indeed, in the new learning economy context and its rapid diffusion of knowledge within and between firms, the success of businesses may reside not only in the ability of individuals to learn but, also, in the ability to share and work together in a smooth and trust atmosphere (le ‘bien vivre ensemble’ -a better living together-), involving a balance between personal and social emotional competencies. In another word, successful and sustainable organizations will depend a lot on people and organisation “emotional capital” (Gendron, 2004), and the way they will manage it, i.e. take into account workers’ emotional competencies, using them in an efficient and ethic way for creating a workplace that is conducive to being resilient and promotes well-being.

Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford, July 2007 4

1.3. Emotional capital and Human Resource and Knowledge management

In the learning economy context, the success of individuals and companies may reside not only in the ability of individuals to learn but, also, in the rapid diffusion of knowledge within and between companies. And that will depend a lot on emotions and emotional capital: not only have those from employees but above all those of managers in charge of OW human resource and knowledge transfer’s management. Emotional capital (Gendron, 2004) “is the set of resources (emotional competencies) that inhere to the person, useful for personal, professional and organizational development”.

Those emotional competencies refer to the emotional intelligence models from Salovey, Mayer, Boyatzis and Goleman. Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to monitor one's own and other's emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions i.e. the ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions as a source of energy, information, creativity, trust and connection. But both, Goleman and Mayer, Salovey have also argued that by itself emotional intelligence probably is not a strong predictor of job performance. Rather, it provides the bedrock for competencies that are. Goleman has tried to represent this idea by making a distinction between emotional intelligence and emotional competence and divides it up into several emotional competencies: personal and social competencies. This set of competencies compounds the emotional capital (Gendron, 2004). The personal competence contains two competencies: self-awareness and self-regulation. Self-awareness concerns knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions. This competence allows to identify and name one's emotional states and to understand the link between emotions, thought and action. It refers to how much we understand ourselves and have confidence in our feelings and abilities. Equipped with this awareness, an individual can better manage his own emotions and behaviours and better understand and relate to other individuals and systems. Self-regulation or self-management refers to managing ones' internal states, impulses, and resources i.e. to managing one's emotional states - to control emotions or to shift undesirable emotional states to more adequate ones. This competence refers to how well we behave under stress, or how it can be counted on to use emotions to help us achieve ends without harming ourselves or others.

Social competencies include social awareness and social skills of communication. Social awareness refers to how people handle relationships and awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns. Social skills concern the skills or adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others. Those competencies are related to communication, influence, conflict management, leadership attitude, change, catalyst, building bonds, collaboration, team synergy…as they allow entering and sustaining satisfactory interpersonal relationships. And those competencies are important to create a positive atmosphere at work. Thus, for companies, an optimal knowledge management or the optimal constitution of collective knowledge will depend a lot on their emotional capital. Specifically in relation to today's fluid work

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Management 5 environment, emotional capital is as important as human capital; precisely, human capital is necessary but not sufficient for work. Indeed, number of researches shown that managers with leadership competencies (trust, empathy, awareness, integrity…) referring to emotional capital, can facilitate teamwork, enhance efficiency and quality as well as of his staff. I illustrate that point through a scheme below that I named “Knowledge Management Triangle”.

Scheme n°1 (Gendron, 2004)

For instance, a manager who knows how to handle and manage his or her emotions, and deals with those of his or her employees to make them feel well at work, will use plainly his or her workforce and will succeed in his or her enterprise. Also, workers will engage plainly themselves in companies’ objectives only if they feel well, recognised, considered, valorised, trusted by their managers (see Elton Mayo’s work in Hawthorne Western Electric Company). Some enthusiastic workers (having charismatic competencies) can also lead to a better work atmosphere among the other workers. They are the ones who are best able to maximize a team's potential, through their use of such emotional competencies as building bonds, collaboration, and creating group synergy in pursuit of collective goals. And such contexts favouring intra-firm networks and co-operative norms can facilitate as written above, teamwork, enhance efficiency and quality as well as improve the flow of information and knowledge crucial for companies. Also, such an emotional capital needs to exist for a successful knowledge transfer and has to be developed and well managed by the organization.

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2. Age and Promoting diversity and Knowledge and Human Resource Managements: Toward a quality of work life and a “better aging, working and learning together”

2.1 Organisational readiness in retaining knowledge and skills

There are different frameworks for organisations to encourage groups and individuals to swap or share knowledge as part of the organisational culture. Encouraging effective and knowledge sharing behaviour requires collaboration and support in a non-political environment, such as voluntary learning communities, knowledge networks or communities of practice. But in order for knowledge transfer to take place, the organisation has to perceive an opportunity for this to happen. Most businesses have not formally addressed the growing trend for workers to leave the labour force in stages. Indeed, if companies are good at anticipating new products or services, they are doing poorly regarding new models of human resource management, especially at anticipating forthcoming intergenerational problems and knowledge sharing and transfer. This latter depends on the organisation’s preparedness, and whether it has processes in place to facilitate it. Often there is a lack of formal processes within organisations, with business managers being responsible for facilitating knowledge transfer. Before embarking on change processes and systems implementation for knowledge management and decision support systems to support knowledge transfer, organizations will have to identify the strategic value proposition for knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer process only will be successful if the organisation has a perspective of knowledge. An organisation’s approach to knowledge management relies on how it views knowledge. Considering knowledge as an object, then the focus will be on building knowledge stocks. But knowledge is a process which involves people, then it implies to emphasise also on knowledge creation, sharing and distribution. In such perspective, the objective of knowledge transfer is not only, capitalizing knowledge and know-how but also, reinventing transitions of workers trajectories according the level of experience construction. Still nowadays, older workers mobility trajectories remain not the focus of HRM. Moreover, some resistances among experienced OW to transfer their knowledge to young workers can be noticed if the mediation is not well managed. Therefore, it would be interesting to explore the impacts of these different views on a knowledge transfer programme. Considering the implications for older workers as mentors would be interesting from this perspective. Especially, it will request to visit the modalities of knowledge transfer and the organisational conditions (smooth work atmosphere, trust, shared objectives, shared benefits…) to perform it (see Emotional Capital and Optimal Knowledge Management, Gendron, 2004).

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Management 7

2.2 The management of all ages through the transformation of the organisation of labour

The age structuring management at work seems not to be appropriate anymore. Managing older workers can not be separated of the overall management. It’s also essential to improve the integration of young people and take account of employees in mid-career and older workers in overall which implies to transform the organisation of labour. Indeed, taking action on the organisation of work means linking the corporate plan to a consideration of the issues of age, the arduousness of work, the conditions of work, the rate of work and working time with a view to ensuring that there is no discrimination. Tailoring career paths to individual needs because they are still dependent on circumstances and opportunities and do not take account of the extension of working life. Revitalising training arrangements and knowledge transmission as its management are a necessity in a background of major changes in the system of training such as the prospects opened up by the cross-industry agreement and the new law in France, but also a situation in which workers over the age of 50 still have very great difficulties in following training; especially, if the transfer of competencies has to be considered a priority for maintaining the quality of the company services and products’ and for the company’s survival. Also, beyond the management of all ages, promoting links between the generations must be considered as a crucial issue in France as in other EU countries.

2.3 The Challenging Management of the Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer and Sharing

If the challenge is global, knowledge is embedded in an organisation’s culture, policies and procedures, systems and documents, as well as individual employees. This knowledge may be tacit (related to actions and experience referring to competence) or explicit (articulated, documented and communicated), and reside with individuals or groups. Knowledge management is seen as a process that involves different activities: creating, storing/retrieving, transferring and applying knowledge. For the benefit of the organisation, special competences and knowledge on business processes needs to be captured effectively when employees depart, so that organisations do not lose large amounts of knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge which needs to be transformed into shared or explicit knowledge. But there are still few studies on how those seeking to acquire knowledge interact with repositories of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge may be person-to-person (expert to mentor) or from system to person, through the use of support tools such as decision support systems, knowledge bases and corporate intranets.

Also, according the age and experience, the nature of the competence and of knowledge evolves. Older workers possess a high level of knowledge, skills and experience that younger workers have not developed to the same degree. Compared with youngsters, for instance, OWs are less focus on technical-productive tasks because they accustomed to fix such tasks. They have developed a broader

Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford, July 2007 8 competence which allows them to anticipate and raise their level of work problems understanding. Also older workers have a range of experience in organisational knowledge that has been built up from lessons learned over time. This leads to a meaningful understanding and perspective on why the organisation functions the way it does, and why certain tactics or approaches would be appropriate. Moreover, beyond individual regulation, collective regulations are also essential to allow knowledge sharing and mutual learning: solidarity between generation as physical engagement or new technology knowledge youngsters exchanges with tacit knowledge engagement of OW can be illustrated through generational distribution of tasks which allow a higher level of performance. The French company Cedilac illustrates such a mutual learning and knowledge exchanges.

2.4 Promoting age, knowledge diversity, sharing knowledge and mutual learning: Cedilac’s experience of “Training whatever the ages” (“Former à tous les âges” )

In order to strengthen the links between the generations in work teams, “a new pact between the generations” could be implemented; so as to ensure that skills are complementary, young people are integrated, older workers are kept and career mobility is increased. Especially, in a tight labour market the intergenerational bond must be maintained with concrete tools. Bonds are thus created in both directions, bringing about a flourishing intergenerational dynamic: older people transmit and young people learn. The experienced employees must also continue to learn, while the youngest people are not completely devoid of experience.

That’s what a French factory, Cedilac, which belongs to an important milk companies’ group implemented. At the industrial site of Cedilac, in Vienne, in the Isère, the factory Cedilac specialized in Utra-temperature sterilization unit (UHT) milk manufacturing, hires over 200 people; almost half of them are over 45 years old. The Cedilac employees are old and the company is having trouble recruiting for the key occupations (manufacturing, packaging, maintenance). Although the age of the supervisors is around 35, the age of the majority of the team members is over 45. These experienced employees know a great deal and must share their knowledge for Marie-Antoinette Blondin, Head of Human Resources at Cedilac Company (Racine, 2005). Therefore, she launched a project named “Training at all ages” (Former à tous les âges) . Older worker would transmit their experiential knowledge to youngsters, and the young people would give their elders the benefit of their skills in other areas, such as information technology. Because the operators had lost a vision of the whole of the system, and good practices were not being transmitted, a reference tool was necessary. The idea was to manage the career paths better and teach the people who had the know-how ways to formalise it. This entailed bringing together the people working in the workshops and asked them to do a breakdown. This request required the employees to conceptualise, look at the details of the chain of events and the problems that cropped up as well as actions that were inappropriate, risky or inadvisable for reasons of effectiveness or organisation.

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Management 9 Fifteen people who repair installations downstream followed very concrete training courses that yielded good results and helped at developing tools. First of all, in order to capitalise on knowledge, diagnostic sheets in computerised form were created. From now, they constitute a database for searching for good methods for solving breakdowns. The diagnostic sheets led to more mixed results. This is in fact an ongoing tool: a person on permanent assignment is required to update the data. Feedback and formalisation sessions are necessary, as well as a dedicated coach. But for the workers, accessing the sheets is not yet a natural reflex. Secondly, the company was able to formalise numerous actions previously done orally. Thus, the sheets for inspecting the machines allow an amateur operator to perform checks on the machine with complete peace of mind. And they will be updated in the future, because they have been unanimously recognised as useful. Through this experience, knowledge management and making effective use of experience were the focus for businesses in order to survive and to prosper.

2.5 Toward a more Human Organisational and Human Resource Management Promoting a better quality of life at work: resiliency, well-being and mutual engagement at work (for a “better aging, working and living together”, Gendron, 2007).

Experience and knowledge of older workers and its transfer in Cedilac example challenge the assumptions underlying the accepted way of doing things: “best practices”. But, if it allows the company to survive, such a best practice will work only if workers feel well and feel treated as human beings in the organisation. To engage workers at sharing knowledge as in adapting to economic changes and work pressures require a resilient workplace which raises organisation and human resource managements’ issues. And, well-being and resiliency at work have both individual and contextual influences and varies according local variables. They require emotional competencies and an ethic management. Indeed, people’s relationship with their environments consists of a two-way dynamic interchange. At the individual level, people encounter demanding situations at work, they appraise the situation and attempt to deal with the demand and in so doing they alter the situation. It is the degree of match between the demand characteristics of a given activity situation of the work and a person’s inventory of available resources (adaptation skills and resources referring to emotional competencies) that has the greatest impact on how much stress he or she will experience. Workers who have adequate repertoires for dealing with the demands they face, and an ability to bounce back from the challenges they encounter, tend to be more flexible and adaptable. Those emotional competencies which most career theorists and career practitioners see as essential for success if not enough developed can be developed through lifelong learning.

Nevertheless, if those emotional competencies are essential to face stressful situations, well-being at work and resiliency depends also on the work context, especially the organisation management and their managers. It is the responsibility

Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford, July 2007 10 of people in leadership roles (managers and supervisors) to create a workplace climate that fosters well-being and facilitates resilience. Managers are charged with making sure that workplace demands are reasonable and that employees have the appropriate skill and knowledge for dealing with the demands they face, if not to change the situation through re-organisation and training.

As a success-oriented workplace is more productive and has higher employee morale, leadership manager has also to motivate employees. Typically workers are motivated when they are working towards a goal that they value, when the goal is perceived to be achievable and when they gain social positive feed-back and values of their work. Therefore, managers who will have developed leadership competences referring to emotional competences (Gendron, 2004) working collaboratively with employees, to construct a shared vision of where the organization is heading, and the vital role that each person plays in helping achieve that vision, are headed in the right direction. Ethic leadership might also consider making work-life balance a criterion in their hiring process and to accept that they are responsible for creating a healthy and resilient work place. Once that attitude is adopted, attention can be turned to modelling a positive orientation, job accomplishments, supporting self-care initiatives, and creating a structure that encourages worker well-being. Thus successful management and successful organisation imply for workers personal competences to adapt themselves to new and demanding situations but also local organisational response to change their work environment, when the organisation is healthy damaging, and, for managers, to have developed ethic leadership competences ; those competences referring to emotional capital. The old adage “We work well when we feel well” has an element of truth in it.

Conclusion

France has been characterized by its older workers management focused on early retirement: less than 37% of workers over 55 years old are working. This policy of early exit has been criticized for its cost for years. And reform debates already have been rancorous, pitting older and younger generations against one another. Social security, health care and pension scheme benefits for retirees, require tax revenues from younger workers. With fewer workers relative to retirees, the burden placed on younger generations will grow. Also, in this context of the baby-boomers departure and the shortage of younger workers within the next decades, organisations are faced with the problem of loss of knowledge, skills and personnel. Extending work lives would help reduce this burden. But it will request a new consensus on age management promoting links between the generations and a “aging, living and working well together”, (le“bien ‘vieillir vivre et travailler’ ensemble”) which will have to be supported by public policies and companies as well. Indeed, policy-makers, local authorities, social partners and businesses will have to anticipate developments in age more effectively and to impulse new solidarity between the generations. It is necessary to allow both older workers and young employees to develop all the growth potential they have instead of excluding them from the

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Management 11 labour market. All the resources available must be mobilised to put this strategy into practice. Like a better balance between the generations, the transitions between different ages also have to be managed better. Thus, it must set up concrete measures to assist and stimulate the necessary changes of attitude to do so. And its seems, even if the concern is global, that good practices are based on a specific and local diagnosis, a tailored action plan comprising a battery of tools and mechanisms that are often combined in order to meet the requests of employees as much as the needs of enterprises.

The implementation of an appropriate policy for reemployment of older workers implies action in different directions: change in employment practices and behaviours; emphasis on job placement; expansion of sources of employment; targeted, motivating training in an individualized program; and local management based on partnership. Thus, the promotion of strategies of diversity is a major contribution of trans-generational cooperation, through which all concerned have come to realise the value of promoting work teams representing the whole range offered by society, in order to make them into a forum conducive to the development of social cohesion practices. In this perspective, the management of all ages provides an opportunity to take a completely fresh look at training mechanisms and systems in order to be more effective in “learning to learn at any age” and so that the skills acquired throughout life are put to use in work teams. Beyond the 2004 French law of Social Modernisation, promoting lifelong learning and the accreditation of experience scheme, it is necessary to focus on the establishment of systems of cross-transfer of skills, which is a way of completely revitalising the practices of tutorship and mentoring and implies that human resource departments have also to refresh the way they manage their work force.

Moreover, the management of all ages questions the practices and shall improve strategies of human resources involving the reformulation of practices of forward management and the renewal of all systems, all resources and all existing tools. For instance, human resources departments will have to care about well-being, health and work conditions of their workers to set up a sustainable and qualitative age management. And the success of such action rests on a solid partnership connecting people whatever the age and the position. Indeed, this pact and those new conditions of intergenerational work will help at transferring the knowledge between older and younger workers, at facilitating exchanges between peers and will participate to the essential knowledge management (Gendron, 2004). But this supposes that management style has also to be reviewed for favouring ethic leadership styles.

To end, a successful enterprise engages each individual’s heart, mind and hands, regarding work, labour and organizational issues. Successful organizations will have also to be emotionally competent organizations. If the importance of human capital as an input has grown over time as production processes have become increasingly knowledge intensive, the knowledge management has become a strategic issue and, knowledge and collective competence crucial added values.

Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford, July 2007 12 Nowadays, to enable an optimal or efficient knowledge management, trough creative and innovative employees’ behaviour, emotional capital is essential. Indeed, in the new learning economy context and its rapid diffusion of knowledge within and between firms, the success of firms may reside not only in the ability of individuals to learn but, also, in the ability youngster as older workers to share and work together in a smooth and trust atmosphere, involving a balance between personal and social emotional competencies. In another word, successful and sustainable organizations will depend a lot on their emotional capital, and the way they will manage it, i.e. take into account their workers’ emotional competencies, using them in an efficient and ethic way. For that reason, companies should consider more seriously how it is important for economic performance, social cohesion and workers well-being to consider work’s atmosphere and employee’s emotions.

To engage individuals in whatever successful enterprises (learning, creating, producing…) requests to engage each individual’s heart, head and hands whatever the age, the gender, the origin, the religion… Especially, at work, to engage human actors in an active process of sense making to continuously assess the effectiveness of best practices requires managing the workforce in a new way: toward partners’ relationship and toward the three H -Hands, Head and Heart- combined to make Human Resource with a big H, a “Resource in Full” (Gendron, 2004).

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Appendix 1.

Goleman (2001) and Personal and Social Emotional Competencies

Human Resource Development Research & Practice across Europe, UFHRD, Oxford, July 2007 14 Self-awareness competence allows to identify and name one's emotional states and to

understand the link between emotions, thought and action. This competence refers to how much we understand ourselves and have confidence in our feelings and abilities. Equipped with this awareness, an individual can better manage his own emotions and behaviours and better understand and relate to other individuals and systems. The self-awareness cluster contains three competencies: emotional self-awareness (recognizing one's emotions and their effects), accurate self-assessment (knowing one's strengths and limits) and self-confidence (a strong sense of one's self-worth and capabilities).

Self-regulation or self-management refers to managing ones' internal states, impulses, and resources i.e. to managing one's emotional states - to control emotions or to shift undesirable emotional states to more adequate ones. This competence refers to how well we behave under stress, or how it can be counted on to uses our emotions to help us achieve ends without harming ourselves or others. The self-regulation and management cluster contains six competencies: self-control (keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check), trustworthiness (maintaining standards of honesty and integrity), conscientiousness (taking responsibility for personal performance), adaptability (flexibility in handling change), achievement orientation (striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence), initiative (readiness to act on opportunities).

Social competencies include social awareness and social skills of communication.

- Social awareness refers to how people handle relationships and awareness of others’ feelings, needs, and concerns. The social awareness cluster contains six competencies: empathy (to read, be sensitive to and influence other people's emotions; this is how sensitive we are to people, both their feelings and their potential i.e. sensing others' feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns), organizational awareness (reading a group's emotional currents and power relationships), service orientation (anticipating, recognizing, and meeting people' needs).

- Social skills concern the skills or adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others. Those competencies are related to communication, influence, conflict management, leadership attitude, change, catalyst, building bonds, collaboration, team synergy…as they allow entering and sustaining satisfactory interpersonal relationships. The social skills cluster contains six competencies: developing others (sensing others' development needs and bolstering their abilities), leadership (inspiring and guiding individuals and groups), influence (wielding effective tactics for persuasion), communication (listening openly and sending convincing messages), change catalyst (initiating or managing change), conflict management (negotiating and resolving disagreements), building bonds (nurturing instrumental relationships), teamwork and collaboration (working with others toward shared goals, creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals).

Gendron (2004): Emotional Capital and Optimal Knowledge Management Emotional Capital is a collective booster: toward an optimal knowledge management

Emotional capital, defined as a set of emotional competences inherent to the person (Gendron, 2004) determines individual potential, especially the one essential to build, use and exploit the different capitals (social, cultural and human capitals). Human capital constitution is dependent on emotional capital as social and cultural capitals. For individuals, the optimal exploitation of their human capital and social and cultural

Emotional Capital and Older Workers Management 15 capitals is dependent on their emotional capital. And for companies, an optimal knowledge management or the optimal constitution of collective knowledge will depend a lot on their emotional capital. Specifically in relation to today's fluid work environment, emotional capital is as important as human capital; precisely, human capital is now necessary and not sufficient conditions for work. There are interplays between the human and social and cultural capitals but above all, that human capital and social capital will be used optimally if individuals have the adequate emotional capital to exploit them (I illustrate this point in the scheme n° 1“Knowledge Management Triangle” by arrows connecting the different capitals each others). Said another way, emotional capital enhance workplace outcomes, but does not guarantee it in the absence of other suitable capitals (Human, social and cultural capital). Number of researches shown that managers with leadership competencies (trust, empathy, awareness, integrity…) referring to emotional capital, can facilitate teamwork, enhance efficiency and quality as well as of his staff. For instance, a manager who knows how to handle and manage his or her emotions, and deals with those of his or her employees to make them feel well at work, will use plainly his or her workforce and will succeed in his or her enterprise. Also, workers will engage plainly themselves in companies’ objectives only if they feel well, recognised, considered, valorised, trusted by their managers (see Elton Mayo’s work in Hawthorne Western Electric Company). Some enthusiastic workers (having charismatic competencies) can also lead to a better work atmosphere among the other workers. They are the ones who are best able to maximize a team's potential, through their use of such emotional competencies as building bonds, collaboration, and creating group synergy in pursuit of collective goals. And such contexts favouring intra-firm networks and co-operative norms can facilitate as written above, teamwork, enhance efficiency and quality as well as improve the flow of information and knowledge crucial for companies.